Just like the People's Princess,
Emma Corrin won't stick to rules, as Josh Smith discovers
There are iconic roles and then there is playing Princess Diana in The Crown. But you won't catch Emma Corrin, the 24-year-old actor who was just 18 months old when Diana died in 1997, using the word 'icon' - and for good reason.
"I find the word icon in reference to any woman we put on a pedestal to be quite reductive," says Emma, while talking about becoming Diana, a role that went so much deeper than wearing a blonde wig, to studying what Emma describes as "the psychological journey" of Diana with a movement coach.
"The label of icon ignores so much of who Diana was and her beautiful complexity," Emma continues, as we meet on the set of her GLAMOUR shoot. "She was called the People's Princess because people felt they could relate to her.
That is so much more important than any kind of label."
Emma - who shares striking physical similarities with the late Princess, including wide blue eyes and that perfect Diana head tilt - also refuses to adhere to labels, especially in beauty. "It's interesting how the media and a lot of our culture loves to pigeon-hole women," she says. "How I present myself, what I do with my make-up, my body hair or anything aesthetically, will always be dictated by what I feel."
An ethos Diana would no doubt have shared, if it wasn't for the expectations of the Royal Family at the time. So, how did Emma seemingly come out of nowhere, bar appearances on ITV's Grantchester and Amazon Prime's Pennyworth -to land one of the most coveted roles on the planet?
Born in Tunbridge Wells, she was rejected from drama school twice, instead going on to study English and drama at Cambridge University, where she performed in 19 plays as a member of the famous Footlights theatre group. Shortly after graduating in 2018, Emma embarked on months of auditions for The Crown, which culminated in a 'proposal', during a staged chemistry reading with Prince Charles, played by Josh O'Connor. She tells me how the show's director, Benjamin Caron, got down on one knee and asked her, '"Will you be our Diana?' It felt like the world stood still for a second," she says.
Shooting on location in Spain for two months was a highlight for Emma, but the trip ended dramatically. "I'm asthmatic and had been ill for a while with a bad cough," she recalls. "I had to film a scene in a freezing-cold swimming pool. It was the hardest scene to film because I was genuinely keeping myself alive treading water. We were meant to be flying back that night to the UK and went past a hospital to get antibiotics. The doctors gave me an oxygen test and said, 'We can't let you go because your oxygen levels are so low,' so I was hospitalized. I remember the nurses figuring out what I was filming and saying, 'Would you like us to put a cardboard box over your head so no one recognizes you?' in broken English!"
Emma also shares the late Princess's rebellious streak with a Gen-Z twist. During our interview, she pulls up the sleeves of her T-shirt to display her armpit hair, before rubbing her hands up her hairy legs, which are clad in floral cycling shorts.
"I've been meaning to grow it for quite a few years, but I'm recently single," she says. "I've been in a relationship and I guess I was programmed to think that I should probably shave for the benefit of both parties. It's been quite an underwhelming realization that there's no drama in it. It's just there. I'm hoping it's on the path to becoming normal."
This marks a turning point in Emma's own relationship with beauty, which was fraught with efforts to fit in during her years attending a Catholic boarding school. And the topic of body image took on a new meaning through portraying Diana at the height of her eating disorder. "I was determined to represent Diana's struggles with bulimia in the right way," she tells me. "In The Crown's version of events, Diana's relationship with her body is dictated by her emotions. It's interesting how our relationship with food and our body image can be so linked to what we're going through emotionally.
"Any time I've experienced an irrational change of my diet or exercise it's so I can feel a sense of control. It gets worse when I'm stressed or sad because it's a way of coping."
Letting go of these pressures came in the form of dance for Diana, and, after learning jazz, tap and ballet for the role, Emma too felt liberated. "When we filmed a scene of her having a ballet lesson, which was meant to symbolise her letting go, I was asked to dance to Believe by Cher - unchoreographed. I just lost my sh*t, and when I went out of the room everyone watching on the screens was crying. It felt like the truest way of working through stuff."
Away from undertaking such a therapeutic role, Emma looks after her well-being in the simplest of ways. "Toast makes me happy, with peanut butter and Lurpak," she says. And therein lies the power of Emma. Just like Diana, she is relatable.